Effects that preclude player agency or cause PCs/NPCs to act in unrealistic ways are objected to. There are any number of ways to implement taunt effects without these.
Certainly there are. Marking, for instance. 4e powers like C&GI. 3e contested skill checks. Simply speaking in character and letting the DM make a judgement.
Then again, if you place the bar for 'realistic' high enough, 0 is a number, too. :|
Nope, not wrong. Speculation about the nature/motivation of the overstatement, sure. But the factual bits were correct as far as they went. FWIW.
Most RPGs, including all editions of D&D certainly fit that definition.
In short: Effect types varied, ranges varied, attack bonuses varied, damage types varied, defenses varied, exceptions varied.
Exception based design, sure, allowed for some variation. The actual range of each of the underlying mechanics (conditions, named bonuses, durations, etc), though, probably peaked in 3e, and, if anything, 5e has ramped 'em back up a bit, thanks to the more traditional approach to spellcasting.
4e had a propensity for a bazillion unique character and monster abilities instead of standardized procedures for attacks, spell-like effects, and maneuvers.
Making allowances for 'bazillion' as rhetorical hyperbole, sure, there were a lot of 'unique' powers in 4e. But, 4e had one mechanic for resolving attacks (spells or spell-like abilities & maneuvers included) - the attack roll - it was the most standardized (and thus simplest), in that sense, D&D has ever been.
Given 5e's emphasis on fast combat and supposed intent of simplicity, returning to separate mechanics for attacks and saving throws doesn't make much sense. It's when we accept that the intent was never simplicity, but familiarity ('classic feel') perceived as such, that it falls into place.
I say squelch because maneuvers in 4e were implemented in a manner so as to render them worthless.
Maneuvers - martial powers or 'exploits' would be the closest analog to 5e maneuvers - were in no way worthless.
Example: Two combatants are fighting atop a parapet. Combatant A decides to try and throw combatant B off the edge. In 5e this is simple - grapple check and done. In 4e this is technically impossible without some of class or monster-specific power because grappling could only pull an enemy behind the grappler.
As Pemerton has pointed out, you could bull-rush someone off a parapet. You'd have to charge, which might not be practical in the middle of a duel, but you could do it, RAW, if you were adverse to improv. If you weren't, well, "Page 42" anyone?
They're circumstantial, sure. But in general - making an enemy prone is worth the cost of an action if two or more allies with more than half equivalent offense can attack (with advantage from the prone condition) before the enemy can stand up.
That's circumstantial, alright. I don't think it deserves the 'in general' lead-in, since it's a pretty specific case of number & capability of allies and lack of advantage from any other source.
More to the point though, as Sacrosanct went into, DPR isn't the defining characteristic of a good or interesting fight.
True, which is why PCs and monsters that have little to contribute beyond DPR can be politely called 'boring.'
When you think about it, presenting boring options is still presenting more options than excluding boring options would have been.
It's not just you. The Internet conventional wisdom heavily overvalues DPR, and undervalues defenses including crowd control, grappling, mobility, and AC. This is partly because DPR is easier to calculate in isolation,
Very much so, yes.
and partly because defense is a little harder to use sometimes (e.g. mobility or hiding doesn't help the party as a whole much unless everyone is fairly mobile/stealthy).
"More situational," yes.
We can't completely dismiss that conventional wisdom, either, but it's good to keep the bias in mind.
5E's designers made a game where it's pretty hard to double your offensive output and really quite easy to double your durability.
Presumably to cater to the above conventional-wisdom misconception. Similarly, the fighter is 'balanced' by his high DPR (and little else), making him 'best at fighting,' because DPR is over-valued.
What's funny is all those 4e examples are present in 5e, again sometimes on the same monster (when they just lazily slap spellcasting on them) and some of them, like the longbow attack, have just as many rolls as in 5e.
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What 5e has done is go back to a dichotomy of brainless no-option offerings like the ogre, and ones with a plethora of options (casters). I prefer 4e's approach, where there was a more even spread, since if you look at creatures like the archmage, what are realistically the chances you go through even half of that spell list?
The 4e approach to class design prioritized balance, and the approach to monster design assumed any given (individual) monster would likely make only one appearance. That did result in a narrower range of complexity in both cases, FWIW.
I thought I did a good job getting this across earlier, or maybe I just assumed people grasped it from the opening statements of the thread, but this is a RAW discussion.
There's not much point to that in 5e. Over-reverence for the RAW was a 3e phenomenon, and it may have been OK in 4e, where the rules were OK if you stuck to 'em, but 5e really invites the DM to mess with the rules all he wants, the RAW is only a starting point.
Judging 5e by RAW is like running a race without ever leaving the starting blocks.
The difference between fluff and mechanics is that fluff is under no requirement to be balanced.
Depending on the design philosophy there may be no /requirement/ to balance mechanics, either. Arguably, 5e's design philosophy doesn't prioritize balance very highly. For one thing, balance can be brittle, and 5e is meant to be DM-customizeable. A meticulously balanced game discourages tinkering, for fear you might 'break' it. No matter how much people might complain that a looser design is 'broken,' it encourages & facilitates tinkering.
